Australia
Australia
At school we draw in the margins of our notebook paper
and toy with the idea of moving to Australia.
We look up the latest news in between classes, knowing that
the teachers will think we're addicted to our phones.
Really we're paranoid, our fingernails
bitten to the quick.
We watch a week pass and wonder
how it's already begun to feel normal,
the creeping dread like a tidal wave,
the kind of dread
that is usually reserved for exam season.
Sometimes we forget
but hardly ever.
My Italian friends
joke that we'll be deported
and I laugh along with them, thinking of the families
who cried tears of joy
when they got their papers,
who will be forced to return
to countries marked by devastation
and the purple-blue-black of endless night.
The Statue of Liberty
stands stony-faced, her torch outstretched
like a false promise.
Like a goodbye.
In the South, a woman
receives two red lines like a death sentence. She knows
the way men twist their need to control
into poisonous protection, stripping her
of the decision to wait. She cries,
because she voted
to never have to fear two red lines again, she voted
secretly, fervent hope in the privacy of a ballot box.
She cries,
and she tells her coworkers it's allergies.
My mother cancels
her New York Times subscription.
She walks our dog
along the meadow that winds behind our house
in the sunniest part of the day
and calls it coping.
She says we can focus on ourselves, on our family
and everything else will melt away like sugar cubes
in the herbal tea she makes for me.
I try to believe her.
I read long articles
about the American dream, and learn nothing
as I sit in the car and forest gives way to town,
home gives way to school, fatigue still
blurring the edges of everything, night still
clinging to day. I think of
my ancestors and their fantasies of streets paved with gold
as my father's tires roll over the pavement.
I count the days.
64, which still feels
impossibly long.
64, which will soon
curl into nothing.
The Voice
December 2024
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Australia
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